When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was hot in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning.
Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the 2 million children who die each year for want of proper water and sanitation.
The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm.
Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.
For example, the Lifestraw is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:
… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.
Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [Link]
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The original Lifestraw was field tested amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir.
Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product – that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [Link].
There there is Dean Kamen’s Slingshot project. Kamen is the inventor of the Segway, and his idea was to use cow dung (and other easily available fuels) to run a special high efficiency Stirling Engine which would produce electricity and clean water for sale:
Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, has invented two new devices, each about the size of a washing machine, that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day from any water source, even sewage. The power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
The prototypes cost about $100,000 but eventually he hopes to mass produce them for about $1000 to $2000 which he will lease to local entrepreneurs, who will resell the power and water to local rural villagers in third world countries. The market potential is huge – about 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and another 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. [Link]
He’s working with Iqbal Qadir, founder of the Grameen Phone business, to try to create the entrepreneurial infrastructure for this to work:
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water … and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine’s waste heat.
“Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies…”Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.[Link]
I haven’t heard anything since the project was unveiled in February, and couldn’t find a website for it, so I hope the project hasn’t fallen by the wayside already.
Both of these approaches have the virtue of bypassing an ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy. Both also seem too expensive to work as purely for-profit ventures. Despite what advocates of the Bottom of the Pyramid approach argue, it’s very hard to make money off of the poorest of the poor since they have so little to spend. Even when it might make sense for the poor to invest in private water systems, they simply don’t have the cash to do so.
This is where a third approach comes in, one that emphasizes finance over technical innovation:
The WaterCredit Initiative has a more scaleable approach. Recognizing the creditworthiness of the poor, it has moved from one-time grants to providing small loans, successfully applying microfinance principles to cover the upfront costs of water systems. [Link]
This is more eclectic, and relies purely on available technology. It is not likely to be a full solution to the problem either – people can only invest in water where it is cheap enough to provide a short term economic benefit as opposed to a long term health benefit, which again leaves out the poorest of the poor. Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle. The Water Credit Initiative has field projects in Bangladesh and India as well as Ethiopia, Honduras and Kenya.
This problem will not be solved overnight. Instead, this is a battle that can only be won drop by drop.
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Related posts: World Water Day, A nation parched, Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Paani?
It is a good idea methinks. I liked the story of how your personal experience when you were sick once as a child without air-conditioning in relation to the compassion towards millions of children who are dying for want of clean water that we take for granted.
This is splendid! The government should be persuaded to give subsidy on technologies like this, instead of giving free power to farmers.
What do you think about handpumps?
More ABCD masturbation. Like I said, shame on the womb…
$2 a person. So 2 million people = $4 million dollars.
= pennies for Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation.
I think FOB_SUITABLE_BOY has been drinking his own dirty water or something.
At some point, bottom of the pyramid innovation is a gold mine, not just economically, but spiritually as well. Clean drinking water will also save billions in health care costs that villagers can reinvest in their own infrastructure.
It’s going to have to be in another post, but BoP is a nice idea which is largely bunk in practice. Most of the examples they use are non-profits, not for profits, and outside of sharing phones, they don’t really have a good example. The reason is that the extreme poor have too little to be a useful market, and the transaction costs are too high. Furthermore, splitting things into smaller packets actually increases per unit cost, which isn’t very handy to the poor.
How this applies here is that the BoP market for water is a paltry $20 Billion, the smallest of the BoP markets. At the same time, it’s a very hard market to crack, and it’s not clear that people will spend the money for the added quality.
I think the answer here is demand side, not supply side – you have to make people wealthier if you want the market to respond to them better.
It’s too large for the Gates’ foundation:
That would be 2.2 Billion US dollars a year (although the cost per unit would probably go down drastically once you produced in quantities so large). And it still wouldn’t solve the problem of water availability, so women would still walk miles to get water for the family. With that kind of water in play, you could build a far more efficient municiple water supply with a good pricing scheme.
Absolutely, couldn’t agree with you more. We need sizeable taxcuts for the poor.
Amazing technology! Things like these just get better & more affordable every year. Hope the idea takes off and will be successful. Pure clean water (among other things) does contribute vastly to better public health. However, funding seems to be a big issue. Most politicians (everywhere) probably won’t work towards sensible solutions like this so funding may have to just come from concerned and well off citizens, etc.
Stuff like this has been tried again and again, and it has failed. From solar-powered family-sized desalinators in the saline Bhal region of south Gujarat, to individual-sized>.de-arsenifiers in Bangladesh, to pen-shaped ozonizers in Rajasthan, and I have been personally involved with the implementation of at least two of these ideas. None of them worked? Why? I do not know. What I do know is that it certainly seems easier to protest from an armchair against dams in developing countries (which will provide clean, drinkable, irrigable water) than it is to come up with a realistic assessment of whether these nifty gadgets (which will clean water, if available) will work on a widespread scale.
LOLZ, only 12 comments on a drinking water post. There are 120 when something of 1/1000th significance is posted here.
The Lifestraw is an interesting concept, but at $2 a pop, it isn’t going to be accessible to the people who need it the most. One thing I wonder about is whether just old-fashioned boiling of water wouldn’t do the trick for most people? That doesn’t address the problem of lack of access, but it’s a much cheaper solution than a portable filtration system.
The other issue is Riparian rights law in India is seriously messed up. That may have some influence on the availability of water. Now that’s something that state government and the center can do something about, and pretty quickly, if they can set aside political gain for three seconds.
If the government gets into a contract to buy in a certain number of these “straws” and distribute them … it shouldn’t be such a bad idea .. the only thing is that it should not be as blunderous as the olpc gamble… with certain sensible and sizeable donations, this could actually end up with the ppl who need it the most ..
The straw is in interesting concept, and certainly will be great when used for drinking purposes. It won’t be as effective when used when water is used for cooking purposes (pani puri, daal, etc), but something is better than nothing.
What about boiling water? I know that doesn’t fix everything, but in some areas, isn’t boiling the cooking water enough to make it sanitary? btw, I know that this doesn’t solve the access problem, but once a family has water, I imagine in some places it can be used for cooking once it is boiled.
Also, I think that aside from the steep cost, the concept of the lifestraw is pretty amazing. And ironically, the States has some of the best drinking water in the world and yet almost everyone I know prefers bottled water to what comes out of the tap. Maybe if we siphoned the money that we spent in bottled water into a lifestraw fund, we could ease the burden.
Yet another impractical idea from people who have probably never ever set foot in a slum or village. Do you seriously expect people to wear these syringes round their necks for a year? Get real folks. Oh who cares about practicality, it’s all that damn VC money anyway.
No Von Mises, Absolutely, couldn’t agree with you more. We need sizeable taxcuts for the poor. Please take a look at this post on the IndianEconomy blog, and the comments therein.
How…how does this work? Do you use your lungs or what?
So my question for DesiDawg and delta_t is: as people who do presumably have a lot of experience dealing with water projects, or at least Indian poverty, what would you suggest? If individual technology isn’t the right solution, what is? Where is the system breaking down at present? Is it delivery infrastructure? Treatment and reclamation? Simple capacity shortages? Something my simple ABCD mind can’t even theorize?
I know I can find reports, etc… on it, but I’m interested in a personal view.
yo…that lifestraw is the coolest shit i’ve ever seen/heard of. those engineers need to work on sustainability issues and that thing would be golden. bringing an electrolysis machine to produce clean from dirty or salt water would be very difficult and i would assume more expensive than the lifestraw–it would require training community leaders to use the machine, providing support when it breaks, updates on parts, proper rationing of water if there were to be a drought, addressing of ethics issues…i support the individual approach more. causes less problems…MUCH more sustainable…
I could stick my fingers inside my ribcage and touch the bottom one or two from within. I was extremely gaunt.
Photographs, please.
And don’t tell me there arent any, because Indian parents take pictures of their children when they’re sick, I have pictures of myself with mumps and measles when I was a kid.
There are other techniques as well, such as simple solar water sterilization:
The beauty of the privatization plans is that they create incentives for people to produce clean water, or for them to produce devices to produce clean water, since there is a profit. Systems like these, if they work, are less likely to break down than public ones since entrepreneurs have an incentive to keep the clean water flowing. The problem is that their markets usually can’t bear the cost, and that entrepreneurs are operating at a small enough scale that their water is actually more expensive.
It’s not an easy problem to tackle and even the strongest boosters of pure privatization are now talking public-private partnerships.
They were horrified and didn’t want to look let alone snap. My parents are not that typical.
this is so fascinating! thanks for the article, ennis
Ennis under a privatization model whats to stop a company like say…Bechtel coming to India and repeating the same nightmare they have in Bolivia? Bechtel could easily absorb startup costs…then once they were established and monopolized; could apply scarcity pricing…but of course they would never do that :}
D:
And this “tickled”? As opposed to “caused searing pain”?
TMI, but I was probably that skinny again just at the end of puberty, when I was 135 lbs and 6’3″ tall.
Very informative post, Ennis! Has anyone checked out bhookh.com? It is a really neat idea! They started out with no sponsors but now have quite a few sponsors helping them out with their goals. I visit the site everyday to “donate a cup of food” as they say. Maybe Lifestraw / Iqbal and Dean / Water Credit Initiative could do something along similar lines (or even join hands with bhookh.com).
Grrr got bhookh.com’s URL wrong in my previous comment… Correct URL for bhookh.com: http://www.bhookh.com/
I agree, but that’s why I said the medical savings from drinking clean water provides additional purchasing dollars. I don’t have any figures, but I would assume that a lot of the money poor people have (which is obviously not a lot) goes for medical care and lost wages (whatever that may be) taking care of the infirmed. Again, I don’t know exactly what the percentage of water related illnesses are.
I think the straw is a cool idea, but impractical, and also a stigmatization. Locally operated water purification and reclaimation is a more permanent, dignified and sensible solution.
The straw should actually be marketed to hikers and campers for whom the straw would be novel and save them having to carry water supplies in many locations.
Also, I though boiling killed virtually everything?
Boiling does, although lots of people don’t have the fuel or the money to do so.
Boiling does, although lots of people don’t have the fuel or the money to do so.
Big markups on cow patties, you think?
Cow patties produce low energy, they also produce a lot of smoke, which kills women.
Also add lack of time. A poor man, interviewed on TV, said that he worked long hours at several jobs. He didn’t want to wait 30 minutes for the water to boil.
Another classic problem is that the most commonly used fuels for individual boiling in the 3rd world (cow dung, non-fully-dried plant matter, etc.) are among the most polluting & carbon-loaded fuels out there…. Esp. relative to a large, central, modern coal fired plant…
Ennis: You’ve got me hooked with your comments on BoP, something I know a little bit about, and India’s infrastructure challenges, something I’m trying to learn a little bit about. Wait for my response, that is, if I don’t get sidetracked by less weighty matters.
In the meantime, dear readers, please visit this blog for more education on topics such as these – http://www.indianeconomy.org. Written by a bunch of superintelligent economists, mostly young, mostly living in India, and totally aware of what’s going on worldwide. But I must warn you – they are all dyed-in-the-wool “free marketers.”
Cow patties produce low energy, they also produce a lot of smoke, which kills women.
I know, and I was mostly being facetious, but it strikes me that the real problem with boiling is the wait time. What if you’re thirsty at your work site? Most people (esp. the urban poor) are not going to have the ability to boil water on-site. That’s where something like the Filterstraw might come in handy.
See above, I left a comment about simple solar water purification. On a hot day, if you’ve got a black roof, the sun can purify water in a plastic bottle within an hour. However, you do need that direct sunlight, which you don’t have everywhere.
Boiling will not remove pollutants, toxins, lead and heavy metals. It will simply kill microorganisms. Boiling alone is not enough, you need to filter/purify the water too.
Just a note to new commenters who may be unaware– we ban for switching handles within the same thread. One of you has used three different “names” here, please don’t. Thank you.
Yup, what he said. =)
I wish boiling would be enough..but it’s not.
Lifestraw seems to be directed at eliminating bacteria and parasites. To wit:
“Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea.”
Most enteric microorganisms are eliminated via boiling. I think that the solar water treatment method Ennis referenced in #40 is the way to go, if the primary concern is say, cholera.
Minor threadjacking for the sake of some liquid trivia
Scene: Udipi restaurant outside random railway station in India . At counter, Udipi boss man is running his fingers through coin box while shooing away a visiting cow with the other. Behind him agarbatti is burning.
Waiter brings over four or five glasses of water. Guess how he holds them?
Customer grabs one of said glasses and drinks? Guess how he does it? Someone unseen taps customer’s ankle. Customer raises feet. Guess who it is?
Boiling is energy-intensive in a country that has already depleted most of its forests in the North, and is rapidly depleting the Southern forests. It’s not as effective as filtration, for the reasons cited above, and also for the simple reason that boiled water is subject to contamination immediately after boiling.
Filtered water via the Lifestraw sounds like a great idea to me. At $2 a pop it might not be universally accessible, but it’s also not beyond the means of many people, and it’s definitely in the reach of NGO-sponsored programs. It falls squarely into the whole LED-lights-for-kids-who-need-to-read, food-so-they-can-study model of getting things done by meeting the basic needs that has proven so effective in the past.
My one caveat would be some kind of warning system for when the Lifestraw is no longer effective or past its useful life that would render it inoperative or be very very obvious.
Clean water is such a huge problem. All of these seem like great ideas, really. They’d address the issue at the most basic level of demand. And I really like the idea of creating electrical entrepreneurs, although I would bemoan the next step, which is fairly obvious: more shoddy electrical infrastructure. 1 kilowatt at moderate amperage is not going to push the electricity very far, so you’ll have lots of small industries with a cap on their growth. Then again, they could always lease another if it works that well, hmm?
I want a Lifestraw for camping, now.
Question:
Why can’t the multi-layer, multi-method filtration system be implemented on a larger scale? Say, to produce enough water for a few families? It would need access to a largish body of water, but a gravity system or an evaporation-condensation system that could be built for cheap (say for the price of 10-50 LifeStraws) would be invaluable…that same micro-financing / leasing / NGO model would apply again?
And you know, most of northern India has so much sunlight they gotta hide from it. It would be great if they could put it to work like this.
Zoroastrian, why is it a stigmatization? Just curious, here. It seems very neutral-to-kind-of-cool to me, but then again, I’m not the “target audience.” Hell, I want one for myself!
Neal (without the e)- I didnt mean to sound like a contemptuous tightass the way I did. You ask a very fundamental question; I doubt anyone has a complete answer. Here is my take: Like you guess, the problem, at the primary level, is of a source/capacity nature. The lack of water seems to preclude such solutions. I havent been able to figure out the rationale why a lack of water does not push people towards healthier and more water efficient solutions, but its true. It is some profound anthropological reason by my guess; too bad there are too few or no anthropologists in this sector.
Why is this a surprise? A good that is provided cheaply and which nobody makes money off of is underprovided? That’s basic market economics 101. Either you need a highly responsive and transparent government, so that people can figure out who is failing and kick the bastards out, or you need a competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, with water for the poor we have neither. The very poor can’t afford much water, and they also can’t exert much political pressure.